


Desolation

by Nebbles



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Gen, this is the slightest of canon divergence, where no one stops roy from burning envy to a crisp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-26
Updated: 2018-08-26
Packaged: 2019-07-02 23:12:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15806472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nebbles/pseuds/Nebbles
Summary: Revenge isn't all it's chalked up to be.





	Desolation

He doesn’t know where Lieutenant Hawkeye or Fullmetal is - he doesn’t want to think, he doesn’t know, he almost doesn’t care. His senses are wreathed in white-hot anger, channeled towards the pathetic form under his boot that once lauded itself as Envy. The desperate cries it makes for its life muffle under a sharp snap of his fingers. His flames lick the ground, slow and controlled, patiently awaiting that perfect moment to strike.

It’s not like Ishbal. It’s not an endless swath of destruction and death, sinking innocent bodies into the sand. It’s still taking a life, but one that deserves to rot in this underground labyrinth. 

It’s what Roy keeps telling himself, eyes ablaze with anger. It’s what’s right, what should’ve happened ages ago, to finally put Hughes to rest. Roy’s only angry because it took this long. His flames swirled closer to Envy’s body, and he almost has the heart to ask if last words are to be had.

It cries out once more the same mantra - he doesn’t want to die. A nice sentiment, Roy sneers, one that Hughes probably thought before the last of his blood was spilled. Were there any pity in his heart, he’d strip the gloves from his hands and walk away. Leave Envy in this state, raspy breaths inhaling the charred air around him. Yet pity isn’t something Roy holds in his heart at the moment, and he just doesn’t care because Hughes is gone, he’s beneath the earth, he’ll never see his daughter grow up and make her beloved father proud.

He doesn’t hesitate. A snap echoes throughout their surroundings as he kicks Envy into a maelstrom of flames, his shrieks drowning amidst them. The smell of char prickles through the air as a damning, eerie silence falls over Roy’s shoulders. Envy’s dead, and the only evidence it’d ever been here is a streak of ash on the ground. Beyond that, the crypt is empty - empty like his heart should not have been.

When the anger dissipates, Roy numbly picks his gloves off. He inspects the white fabric in his hands, turning them over as his eyes glaze over the transmutation circle emblazoned on them. After Ishbal, he’d sworn his hands wouldn’t play to senseless murder. It’s funny how life plays with expectations like that, and funny how anger burns in him, enough to drown out any feelings he might’ve had before.

It didn’t feel anything like Roy had hoped for - then again, revenge is often empty. Revenge doesn’t bring back the dead, and it does little to honor their memory. Burning Envy to a crisp does nothing for a man lying in his grave. It doesn’t make the pain on Hughes’ family any easier, and it doesn’t automatically unravel the coil Roy’s wrapped around his heart.

The flames have long petered out, yet he feels them envelop him with an unbearable heat more suffocating than the deserts of Ishbal. The same feeling of discomfort pokes and prods him, and he wonders what might’ve happened if he waited a little longer for Fullmetal and the Lieutenant to show up. 

Those are answers he’ll never get, he supposes. Blinded under the stupor of revenge, cloaked in cinders, Roy cries for the first time since Hughes’s funeral.


End file.
